Let's write about November 19th the year 1863 and the Gettysburg Address

 Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American in substack:  

President Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg, PA- For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address (1863)- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Let's write about war photography

 The Civil War Photographers Before Kirsten Dunst

Check my Maine Writer Vietnam war history photo in this blog.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

The Still Picture Branch of the National Archives contains the glass-plate negatives of the real Civil War, including those by the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan.
Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Robert Sullivan

Alex Garland’s new film, “Civil War,” follows two war photographers on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., via the blue highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

The more experienced photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, uses a Sony digital camera, while her apprentice, played by Cailee Spaeny, shoots a Nikon and makes old-school film negatives of a fictional civil war. 

A real-life road trip to Washington, D.C., via I-95, brings you past the National Archives campus in College Park, Maryland, where the archivists in the Still Picture Branch manage the actual photos of the actual Civil War and the negatives from which they were printed. Like Spaeny’s character, actual Civil War photographers developed images in the field, theirs made on glass plates coated with collodion, a syrupy chemical compound that was also used by Civil War-era surgeons as a liquid bandage.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

One of the very few people who have come in contact with them during the past two decades is Billy Wade, the Still Picture Branch’s supervisory archivist. There are roughly nine thousand plates from the war and subsequent Western surveys, which ended in the eighteen-seventies. The cabinets that house the plates are sky blue. Each shelf holds about a hundred, all in a NASA-level climate-­controlled room. 

Wade told a visitor, “The other day, I was in there, and I thought, I wonder if anybody will ever ask what they look like, so I took a picture with my phone.” In the image he made, the cabinets have a nineteen-sixties computer-lab vibe: the rows of plates in flapped enclosures could be powerful servers that fuel the national memory bank.

“I’ve got some things pulled,” Wade said. He went away and returned pushing a cart holding prints made by Alexander Gardner, a Scottish photographer who started the war working for the better-­known Mathew Brady, then went out on his own. 

All the photographs were made for what is often called the first photo book, “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War.” At the center of Gardner’s book is one of the archive’s most frequently requested photos of the time, made by his partner Timothy O’Sullivan, at Gettysburg, after the battle. Gardner titled it “A Harvest of Death,” and it is fascinating for the way the details of the dead are in sharp focus, while the living are like ghosts. 

After the war, O’Sullivan went West with scientists and soldiers and made what is probably the archive’s most requested survey photograph—a sand dune, about three miles long, in Nevada. That picture features the army ambulance that O’Sullivan converted into a travelling darkroom. The photo of the sand dune, creamy and smooth, is an albumen print, made with an antique process that uses egg whites. (Photographic journals at the time featured cheesecake recipes.)

@LHeureux  www.mainewriter.com Richard LHeureux PN1, USN, Vietnam fox hole Chu Lai MCB 71, in 1967. 
A Maine Writer war history photograph.

Among the fourteen million unique analog photos at the Still Picture Branch are images from every war that has been photographed. It is common for veterans to visit; the parking lot is often dotted with cars bearing Vietnam War insignia. “We’ve had war photographers come in here and say they remember making these pictures,” Wade said.

Recently, Dennis Fisher, a Marine combat photographer now in his seventies, stopped in to see negatives that he had developed in Vietnam, in 1967, and 1968. He was assisted by Cecilia Figliuolo, an archivist with an interest in combat photography, who spoke to him about the photos he had made twenty-eight years before she was born. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘This is the first time I’ve held these negatives since I was 20 or 21,’ ” she wrote in “The Unwritten Record,” one of the archive’s blogs. Sitting with the veteran, Figliuolo learned details that the archivists could only have guessed at. As Fisher studied a picture of two men firing mortars in May, 1968—part of a U.S. operation to clear land south of Da Nang—he told Figliuolo that he had brought a tape recorder along on the mission, to record the sonic chaos. “Did you take your recorder out with you every time?” she asked.

“No, I took it out once, and it was such a pain in the ass to lug around I never took it out again,” he said.

When Fisher returned home from the archive, he phoned Figliuolo, and played her the cassette tape, but what she remembered long after his visit was that, when he had stared at the battle scenes in the archive, it was as if that audiotape were playing in his head. “In that moment, I could tell that he could hear it,” she said. “He remembered everything.” 

Published in the print edition of the May 6, 2024, issue, with the headline “War Stories on Film.”